Ancient Maritime History

11:48 AM | BY ZeroDivide EDIT
This is a timeline of events in maritime history.

Age of Discovery[edit]

See also: Timeline of European exploration

Maritime history dates back thousands of years. In ancient maritime history,[1] evidence of maritime trade between civilizations dates back at least two millennia.[2] The first prehistoric boats are presumed to have been dugout canoes which were developed independently by various stone age populations. In ancient history, various vessels were used for coastal fishing and travel.[3]
The Arabian Sea has been an important marine trade route since the era of the coastal sailing vessels from possibly as early as the 3rd millennium BCE, certainly the late 2nd millennium BCE through later days[4] known as the Age of Sail. By the time of Julius Caesar, several well-established combined land-sea trade routes depended upon water transport through the sea around the rough inland terrain features to its north. Navigation was known in Sumer between the 4th and the 3rd millennium BCE, and was probably known by the Indians and the Chinese people before the Sumerians.[5] The Egyptianshad trade routes through the Red Sea, importing spices from the "Land of Punt" (East Africa) and from Arabia.[6][7]

Ancient Seafaring[edit]


Indigenous Americans making a dugout canoe, a practice which they had done for centuries

Maritime prehistory[edit]

The Indigenous of the Pacific Northwest are very skilled at crafting wood. Best known for totem poles up to 80 feet (24 m) tall, they also construct dugout canoes over 60 feet (18 m) long for everyday use and ceremonial purposes.[8]
The earliest seaworthy boats may have been developed as early as 45,000 years ago, according to one hypothesis explaining the habitation of Australia. Humans used boats for travel and eventually for food resources. In the history of whaling, humans began whaling in pre-historic times. The oldest known method of catching whales is to simply drive them ashore by placing a number of small boats between the whale and the open sea and attempting to frighten them with noise, activity, and perhaps small, non-lethal weapons such as arrows. Typically, this was used for small species, such as Pilot Whales, Belugas and Narwhals.
Over thousands of years of human migrations and the rise of ancient civilizations, seafaring exploration led to ocean trade routes. The earliest known reference to an organization devoted to ships in ancient India is to the Mauryan Empire from the 4th century BC. It is believed that the navigation as a science originated on the river Indus some 5000 years ago.

Ancient routes and locations[edit]

Ancient maritime routes usually began in the Far East or down river from Madhya Pradesh with transshipment via historic Bharuch (Bharakuccha), traversed past the inhospitable coast of today's Iran then split around Hadhramaut into two streams north into the Gulf of Aden and thence into the Levant, or south into Alexandria via Red Sea ports such as Axum. Each major route involved transhipping to pack animal caravan, travel through desert country and risk of bandits and extortionate tolls by local potentiates.[9]
Names, routes and locations of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea at the turn of the first millennium.

Much of the Radhanites' Indian Oceantrade would have depended on coastal cargo-ships such as this dhow.
Maritime trade began with safer coastal trade and evolved with the manipulation of the monsoon winds, soon resulting in trade crossing boundaries such as the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.[2] South Asia had multiple maritime trade routes which connected it to Southeast Asia, thereby making the control of one route resulting in maritime monopoly difficult.[2] Indian connections to various Southeast Asian states buffered it from blockages on other routes.[2] By making use of the maritime trade routes, bulk commodity trade became possible for the Romans in the 2nd century BCE.[10] A Roman trading vessel could span the Mediterranean in a month at one-sixtieth the cost of over-land routes.[11]
See also: Ship transport

Egypt[edit]


Egyptian ship, 1250 BC

World's oldest depiction of a stern-mounted steering rudder (c. 1420 BC)
The Ancient Egyptians had knowledge of sail construction.[12] This is governed by the science of aerodynamics. A primary feature of a properly designed sail is an amount of "draft", caused by curvature of the surface of the sail. Hannu was an ancient Egyptian explorer (around 2750 BC) and the first explorer of whom there is any knowledge. He made the first recorded exploring expedition and wrote his account of the exploration in stone. He traveled along the Red Sea to Punt and sailed to what is now part of eastern Ethiopia and Somalia. He returned to Egypt with great treasures, including precious myrrh, metal and wood. It must be said also about warships. Undoubtedly, warships of Ancient Egypt began in the early Middle Kingdom, and perhaps - at the end of the Old Kingdom, but the first mention and a detailed description of a large enough and heavily armed ship dates from XVI BC. "And I ordered to build twelve warships with rams, dedicated to Amunor Sobek, or Maat and Sekhmet, whose image was crowned best bronze noses. Carport and equipped outside rook over the waters, for many paddlers, having covered rowers deck not only from the side, but and top. and they were on board eighteen oars in two rows on the top and sat on two rowers, and the lower - one, a hundred and eight rowers were. And twelve rowers aft worked on three steering oars. And blocked Our Majesty ship inside three partitions (bulkheads) so as not to drown it by ramming the wicked, and the sailors had time to repair the hole. And Our Majesty arranged four towers for archers - two behind, and two on the nose and one above the other small - on the mast with narrow loopholes. they are covered with bronze in the fifth finger (3.2mm), as well as a canopy roof and its rowers. and they have (carried) on the nose three assault heavy crossbow arrows so they lit resin or oil with a salt of Seth (probably nitrate) tore a special blend and punched (?) lead ball with a lot of holes (?), and one of the same at the stern. and long ship seventy five cubits (41m), and the breadth sixteen, and in battle can go three-quarters of iteru per hour (about 6.5 knots)..." The text of the tomb of Amenhotep I (KV39). When Thutmose III achieved warships displacement up to 360 tons and carried up to ten new heavy and light to seventeen catapults based bronze springs, called "siege crossbow" - more precisely, siege bows. Still appeared giant catamarans that are heavy warships and times of Ramesses III used even when the Ptolemaic dynasty.[13]

The world according to Herodotus, 440 BC
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Necho II sent out an expedition of Phoenicians, which in three years sailed from the Red Sea around Africa to the mouth of the Nile. At some point between 610 and before 594 BC, Necho reputedly commissioned an expedition of Phoenicians, who it is said in three years sailed from the Red Sea around Africa back to the mouth of the Nile. Some Egyptologists dispute that an Egyptian Pharaoh would authorize such an expedition,[14] except for the reason of trade in the ancient maritime routes.
The belief in Herodotus' account, handed down to him by oral tradition,[15] is primarily because he stated with disbelief that the Phoenicians "as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya (Africa), they had the sun on their right - to northward of them" (The Histories 4.42) -- in Herodotus' time it was not generally known that Africa was surrounded by an ocean (with the southern part of Africa being thought connected to Asia[16]). So fantastic an assertion is this of a typical example of some seafarers' story and Herodotus therefore may never have mentioned it, at all, had it not been based on facts and made with the according insistence.[17]

This early description of Necho's expedition as a whole is contentious, though; it is recommended that one keep an open mind on the subject;[18] but Strabo, Polybius, and Ptolemy doubted the description. Egyptologist A. B. Lloyd suggests that the Greeks at this time understood that anyone going south far enough and then turning west would have the Sun on their right but found it unbelievable that Africa reached so far south. He suggests that "It is extremely unlikely that an Egyptian king would, or could, have acted as Necho is depicted as doing" and that the story might have been triggered by the failure of Sataspes' attempt to circumnavigate Africa under Xerxes the Great.[19][19] Regardless, it was believed by Herodotus and Pliny.[20]
Much earlier, the Sea Peoples was a confederacy of seafaring raiders who sailed into the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, caused political unrest, and attempted to enter or control Egyptian territory during the late 19th dynasty, and especially during Year 8 of Ramesses III of the 20th Dynasty.[21] The Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah explicitly refers to them by the term "the foreign-countries (or 'peoples'[22]) of the sea"[23][24] in his Great Karnak Inscription.[25] Although some scholars believe that they "invaded" Cyprus,Hati[disambiguation needed] and the Levant, this hypothesis is disputed.
Kingdom of Punt[edit]
Main article: Somali maritime history
Historical Somali commercial enterprise in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and thestraits of Malacca.
In ancient times the Kingdom of Punt, which is believed by several Egyptologists to have been situated in the area of modern-day Somalia, had a steady trade link with the Ancient Egyptians and exported the precious natural resources such as myrrh, frankincense and gum. This trade network continued all the way into the classical era. The city states of Mossylon, Opone, Malao, Mundus and Tabae in Somalia engaged in a lucrative trade network connecting Somali merchants with Phoenicia, Ptolemic Egypt, Greece, Parthian Persia, Saba, Nabataea and the Roman Empire. Somali sailors used the ancient Somali maritime vessel known as the beden to transport their cargo.

The Mediterranean[edit]

Minoan traders from Crete were active in the eastern Mediterranean by the 2nd millennium BC. The Phoenicians were an ancient civilization centered in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coast of modern day Lebanon, Syria and northern Israel. Phoenician civilization was an enterprising maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean during the first millennium BC, between the period of 1200 BC to 900 BC. Though ancient boundaries of such city-centered cultures fluctuated, the city of Tyre seems to have been the southernmost. Sarepta between Sidon and Tyre, is the most thoroughly excavated city of the Phoenician homeland. The Phoenicians often traded by means of a galley, a man-powered sailing vessel. They were the first civilization to create the bireme. There is still debate on the subject of whether the Canaanites and Phoenicians were different peoples or not.
The Mediterranean was the source of the vessel, galley, developed before 1000 BC, and development of nautical technology supported the expansion of Mediterranean culture. The Greek trireme was the most common ship of the ancient Mediterranean world, employing the propulsion power of oarsmen. Mediterranean peoples developed lighthouse technology and built large fire-based lighthouses, most notably the Lighthouse of Alexandria, built in the 3rd century BC (between 285 and 247 BC) on the island of Pharos in Alexandria, Egypt.
Many in ancient western societies, such as Ancient Greece, were in awe of the seas and deified them, believing that man no longer belonged to himself when once he embarked on a sea voyage. They believed that he was liable to be sacrificed at any time to the anger of the great Sea God. Before the Greeks, the Carians were an early Mediterranean seagoing people that travelled far. Early writers do not give a good idea about the progress of navigation nor that of the man's seamanship. One of the early stories of seafaring was that of Odysseus.
In Greek mythology, the Argonauts were a band of heroes who, in the years before the Trojan War, accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the Golden Fleece. Their name comes from their ship, the Argo which in turn was named after its builder Argus. Thus, "Argonauts" literally means "Argo sailors". The voyage of the Greek navigator Pytheas of Massalia is an example of a very early voyage.[26] A competent astronomer and geographer,[26] Pytheas ventured from Greece to Western Europe and the British Isles.[26]
The periplus, literally "a sailing-around', in the ancient navigation of Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans was a manuscript document that listed in order the ports and coastal landmarks, with approximate distances between, that the captain of a vessel could expect to find along a shore. Several examples of periploi have survived.
The concept of an underwater boat has roots deep in antiquity. The very first report of someone attempting to put the idea into practice seems to have been an attempt by Alexander the Great. According toAristotle, Alexander the Great had developed a primitive submersible for reconnaissance missions by 332BC.
Piracy, which is a robbery committed at sea or sometimes on the shore, dates back to Classical Antiquity and, in all likelihood, much further. The Tyrrhenians, Illyrians[27] and Thracians[citation needed] were known as pirates in ancient times. The island of Lemnos long resisted Greek influence and remained a haven for Thracian pirates. By the 1st century BC, there were pirate states along the Anatolian coast, threatening the commerce of the Roman Empire.
The Persian Wars[edit]
Main articles: Greco-Persian Wars and Peloponnesian War

Greek Trireme
In Ionia (the modern Aegean coast of Turkey) the Greek cities, which included great centres such as Miletus and Halicarnassus, were unable to maintain their independence and came under the rule of the Persian Empire in the mid-6th century BC. In 499 BC the Greeks rose in the Ionian Revolt, and Athens and some other Greek cities went to their aid. In 490 BC, the Persian Great King, Darius I, having suppressed the Ionian cities, sent a fleet to punish the Greeks. The Persians landed in Attica, but were defeated at the Battle of Marathon by a Greek army led by the Athenian general Miltiades. The burial mound of the Athenian dead can still be seen at Marathon. Ten years later Darius' successor, Xerxes I, sent a much more powerful force by land. After being delayed by the Spartan King Leonidas I atThermopylae, Xerxes advanced into Attica, where he captured and burned Athens. But the Athenians had evacuated the city by sea, and under Themistocles they defeated the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis. A year later, the Greeks, under the Spartan Pausanias, defeated the Persian army at Plataea. The Athenian fleet then turned to chasing the Persians out of the Aegean Sea, and in 478 BC they captured Byzantium. In the course of doing so Athens enrolled all the island states and some mainland allies into an alliance, called the Delian League because its treasury was kept on the sacred island of Delos. The Spartans, although they had taken part in the war, withdrew into isolation after it, allowing Athens to establish unchallenged naval and commercial power.
Achaean League[edit]
Main article: Achaean League

Athenian warship (Trireme), c. 400 BC
The Achaean League was a confederation of Greek city states in Achaea, a territory on the northern coast of the Peloponnese. An initial confederation existed during the 5th through the 4th centuries BC. The Achaean League was reformed early in the 3rd century BC, and soon expanded beyond its Achaean heartland. The League's dominance was not to last long, however. During the Third Macedonian War (171-168 BC), the League flirted with the idea of an alliance with Perseus, and theRomans punished it by taking several hostages to ensure good behavior, including Polybius, the Hellenistic historian who wrote about the rise of the Roman Empire. In 146 BC, the league erupted into open revolt against Roman domination. The Romans under Lucius Mummius defeated the Achaeans, razed Corinth and dissolved the league. Lucius Mummius received the cognomen Achaicus ("conqueror of Achaea") for his role.
Ancient Rome[edit]
Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew from a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula c. the 9th century BC to a massive empire straddling the Mediterranean Sea. In its twelve-century existence, Roman civilization shifted from a monarchy, to a republic based on a combination of oligarchy and democracy, to an autocratic empire. It came to dominate Western Europe and the entire area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea through conquest and assimilation.
Punic Wars[edit]
Main article: Punic Wars
The Punic Wars were a series of three wars fought between Rome and Carthage. The main cause of the Punic Wars was the clash of interests between the existing Carthaginian Empire and the expanding Roman sphere of influence. The Romans were initially interested in expansion via Sicily, part of which lay under Carthaginian control. At the start of the first Punic War, Carthage was the dominant power of the Mediterranean, with an extensive maritime empire, while Rome was the rapidly ascending power in Italy. By the end of the third war, after the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides, Rome had conquered Carthage's empire and razed the city, becoming in the process the most powerful state of the Western Mediterranean. With the end of the Macedonian wars — which ran concurrently with the Punic wars — and the defeat of the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus III the Great in the Roman-Syrian War (Treaty of Apamea, 188 BC) in the eastern sea, Rome emerged as the dominant Mediterranean power and the most powerful city in the classical world. This was a turning point that meant that the civilization of the ancient Mediterranean would pass to the modern world via Europe instead of Africa.

Pre-Roman Britain[edit]


Ancient British canoe
The Coracle, a small single-passenger-sized float, has been used in Britain since before the first Roman invasion as noted by the invaders. Coracles are round or oval in shape, made of a wooden frame with a hide stretched over it then tarred to provide waterproofing. Being so light, an operator can carry the light craft over the shoulder. They are capable of operating in mere inches of water due to the keel-less hull. The early people of Wales used these boats for fishing and light travel and updated models are still in use to this day on the rivers of Scotland and Wales.
Early Britons also used the world-common hollowed tree trunk canoe. Examples of these canoes have been found buried in marshes and mud banks of rivers at lengths of upward eight feet.[28]
In 1992 a notable archaeological find, named the "Dover Bronze Age Boat", was unearthed from beneath what is modern day Dover, England. The Bronze Ageboat which is about 9.5 meters long × 2.3 meters is determined to have been a seagoing vessel. Carbon dating reveals that the craft dating from approximately 1600 BC. is the oldest known ocean-going boat. The hull was of half oak logs and side panels also of oak were stitched on with yew lashings. Both the straight-grained oak and yew bindings are now extinct as a shipbuilding method in England. A reconstruction in 1996 proved that a crew between four and sixteen paddlers could have easily propelled the boat during Force 4 winds upwards of four knots but with a maximum of 5 knots (9 km/h). The boat could have easily carried a significant amount of cargo and with a strong crew may have been able to traverse near thirty nautical miles in a day. [29]

Northern Europe[edit]

The Norsemen, or 'people from the North', were people from southern and central Scandinavia which established states and settlements Northern Europe from the late 8th century to the 11th century. Vikingshas been a common term for Norsemen in the early medieval period, especially in connection with raids and monastic plundering made by Norsemen in Great Britain and Ireland.
Leif Ericson was an Icelandic explorer known to be the first European to have landed in North America (presumably in Newfoundland, Canada). During a stay in Norway, Leif Ericsson converted to Christianity, like many Norse of that time. He also went to Norway to serve the King of Norway, Olaf Tryggvason. When he returned to Greenland, he bought the boat of Bjarni Herjólfsson and set out to explore the land that Bjarni had found (located west of Greenland), which was, in fact, Newfoundland, in Canada. The Saga of the Greenlanders tells that Leif set out around the year 1000 to follow Bjarni's route with 15 crew members, but going north.[30]

Indian subcontinent[edit]

Main article: Indian maritime history

Evolution of Indian trade networks. The main map shows the routes since Mughal times, Inset A shows the major prehistorical cultural currents, B: pre-Mauryan routes, C: Mauryan routes, D: routes c. 1st century CE, and E: the "Z" shaped region of developed roads.
In the Indian maritime history, the world's first tidal dock was built in phase II of Lothal[31][32] during the Harappan civilisation near the present day Mangrol harbour on the Gujarat coast. Other ports were probably at Balakot and Dwarka. However, it is probable that many small-scale ports, and not massive ports, were used for the Harappan maritime trade.[33] Ships from the harbour at these ancient port cities established trade with Mesopotamia,[34] where the Indus Valley was known as Meluhha.
Emperor Chandragupta Maurya's Prime Minister Kautilya's Arthashastra devotes a full chapter on the state department of waterways under navadhyaksha(Sanskrit for Superintendent of ships) [1]. The term, nava dvipantaragamanam (Sanskrit for sailing to other lands by ships) appears in this book in addition to appearing in the Buddhist text, Baudhayana Dharmasastra as the interpretation of the term, Samudrasamyanam.

This map shows Rajendra Chola's territories and the sea trade route to China.
The Tamil Chola Empire possessed the largest naval force of Indian subcontinent to have util modern time and represented the zenith of ancient Indian sea power.[35][36] Chola Emperor Rajendra Chola had established his rule extending up from India(coramandal coast or present day coast of southern part of Andhrapradesh and Tamil Nadu[37]) to South East Asia with his impressive Chola Navy. Rajendra Chola annexed during his overseas conquests Sri Lanka, Maldives, islands of Andaman, Nicobar, Lakshadweep, parts of the Malay Peninsula andIndonesian archipelago. Through conquest of the Srivijaya Empire, the Cholas secured the sea trade road to China.[38]

China[edit]

Main articles: Naval history of China and Chinese exploration

Close up of a ship from Along the River During Qingming Festival, painted by Zhang Zeduan, early 12th century.
In ancient China, during the Spring and Autumn Period (722 BC–481 BC), large rectangular-based barge-like ships with layered decks and cabins with ramparts acted as floating fortresses on wide rivers and lakes.[39] These were called 'castle ships' ('lou chuan'), yet there were 4 other ship types known in that period, including a ramming vessel.[39] During the short-lived Qin Dynasty (221 BC-207 BC) the Chinese sailed south into the South China Sea during their invasion of Annam, modern Vietnam.
During the Han Dynasty (202 BC–220 AD), a ship with a stern-mounted steering rudder along with masts and sails was innovated, known as the junk in Western terminology.[40] The Chinese had been sailing through the Indian Ocean since the 2nd century BC, with their travels to Kanchipuram in India.[41][42] This was followed up by many recorded maritime travelers following the same route to India, including Faxian, Zhiyan, Tanwujie, etc.[43] Like in the Western tradition, the earlier Zhou DynastyChinese also made use of the floating pontoon bridge, which became a valuable means to blockade the entire Yangtze River during Gongsun Shu's rebellion against the re-established Han government in 33 AD.[44] Although first described in ancient Ptolemaic Egypt, the Song Dynasty scientist Shen Kuo (1031–1095) was the first to describe the use of the drydock system in China to repair boats out of water.[45] The canal pound lock was invented in China during the previous century, while Shen Kuowrote of its effectiveness in his day, writing that ships no longer had the grievances of the old flash lock design and no longer had to be hauled over long distances (meaning heavier ships with heavier cargo of goods could traverse the waterways of China).[46] There were many other improvements to nautical technology during the Song period as well, including crossbeams bracing the ribs of ships to strengthen them, rudders that could be raised or lowered to allow ships to travel in a wider range of water depths, and the teeth of anchors arranged circularly instead of in one direction, "making them more reliable".[47]

A two-masted Chinese junk ship, from the Tiangong Kaiwuencyclopedia published in 1637 by the Ming Dynasty scholarSong Yingxing.
Although there were numerous naval battles beforehand, China's first permanent standing navy was established in 1132 during the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD).[48]Gunpowder warfare at sea was also first known in China, with battles such as the Battle of Caishi and the Battle of Tangdao on the Yangtze River in 1161 AD during the Jin–Song wars. One of the most important books of medieval maritime literature was Zhu Yu's Pingzhou Table Talks of 1119 AD. Although the Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031–1095) was the first to describe the magnetic-needle compass, Zhu Yu's book was the first to specify its use for navigation at sea. Zhu Yu's book also described watertight bulkhead compartments in the hull of Chinese ships, which prevented sinking when heavily damaged in one compartment.[49] Although the drydock was known, Zhu Yu wrote of expert divers who were often used to repair boats that were damaged and still submersed in water. Divers in China continued to have a maritime significance, as the laterMing Dynasty author Song Yingxing (1587–1666) wrote about pearl divers who used snorkeling gear (a watertight leather face mask and breathing tube secured with tinrings) to breathe underwater while tied by the waist to the ship in order to be secure while hunting for pearls.[50]

Japan[edit]

Main article: Naval history of Japan

A clay figure of a haniwa model of a ship, from Japan's Kofun period (250–538); during the Three Kingdoms of Korea, the Japanese sided with Baekje against a naval alliance between the Chinese Tang Dynasty and Korean Silla.
Japan had a navy by at least the 6th century, with their invasions and involvement in political alliances during the Three Kingdoms of Korea. A joint alliance between the Korean Silla Kingdom and the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) heavily defeated the Japanese and their Korean allies of Baekje in the Battle of Baekgang on August 27 to August 28 of the year 663 AD. This decisive victory expelled the Japanese force from Korea and allowed the Tang and Silla to conquer Goguryeo.

See also[edit]

The naumachia (in Latin naumachia, from the Ancient Greek ναυμαχία/naumachía, literally "naval combat") in the Ancient Roman world referred to both the staging of naval battles as mass entertainment and the basin (or more broadly, the complex) in which this took place.

Contents

Early naumachia[edit]

The first known naumachia was given by Julius Caesar in Rome in 46 BC on occasion of his quadruple triumph. After having a basin dug near the Tiber, capable of holding actual biremes, triremes andquinqueremes, he made 2000 combatants and 4000 rowers, all prisoners of war, fight. In 2 BC on the occasion of the inauguration of the Temple of Mars Ultor ("Mars the Avenger"), Augustus gave a naumachia based on Caesar's model. As cited in Res Gestæ (§ 23), he created a basin on the right bank of the Tiber where 3000 men, not counting rowers, fought in 30 vessels with rams and a number of smaller boats.
Claudius gave a naumachia in 52 AD on a natural body of water, Fucine Lake, to celebrate the completion of drainage work and tunneling on the site. The combatants were prisoners who had been condemned to death. Suetonius' account, written many years after the event, has them salute the emperor with the phrase "morituri te salutant" ("those who are about to die salute you"). There is no evidence that this form of address was used on any occasion other than this single naumachia.[1]
The naumachia was thus a bloodier show than gladiatorial combat, which consisted of smaller engagements and where the combat did not necessarily end with the death of the losers. More exactly, the appearance of naumachia is closely tied and only slightly earlier than that other spectacle, "group combat", which did not pit single combatants against one another, but rather used two small armies. There again, the combatants were frequently those on death row and did not have the specialized training of true gladiators. Caesar, creator of the naumachia, simply had to transpose the same principle to another environment.
Through the choreography of the combat, the naumachia had the ability to represent historical or pseudo-historical themes. Each of the fleets participating represented a maritime power of Ancient Greece or the Hellenistic east: Egyptians and the Tyrians for Caesar’s naumachia, Persians and Athenians for that of Augustus, Sicilians and Rhodeans for that of Claudius. It required significantly greater resources than other such entertainments, and as such these spectacles were reserved for exceptional occasions, closely tied to celebrations of the emperor, his victories and his monuments. The specific nature of the spectacle as well as the historical themes borrowed from the Greek world are closely tied to the term naumachia. This word, a phonetic transcription of the Greek word for a naval battle (ναυμαχία / naumakhía), has since come to also refer to the large artificial basins created for them.

Naumachia building[edit]

Caesar’s naumachia, the precise location of which remains unknown, was probably a simple basin dug in the bank of the Tiber.
In contrast, the naumachia of Augustus is better known: in his Res Gestæ (23) Augustus himself indicates that the basin measured 1800 x 1200 Roman feet (approximately 533 x 355 meters). Pliny the Elder(Natural History, 16, 200), tells us that there was an island in the center, probably rectangular and connected to the shore by a bridge where the privileged spectators likely sat.
Taking into consideration the size of the basin and the dimensions of a trireme (approximately 35 x 4.90 meters), the thirty vessels used would hardly be able to manoeuvre. Knowing that the crew of a Roman trireme was approximately 170 rowers and 50 to 60 soldiers, a simple calculation allows us to see that to achieve the number of 3000 men the vessels of Augustus' fleet would have to have held more combatants than an actual fleet. The spectacle thus focused less on the movement of the vessels than the actual presence of them in the artificial basin, and the hand-to-hand combat which developed.
It was different for Claudius' naumachia. The two fleets each consisted of 50 vessels, which corresponds to the number of vessels in each of the two military fleets based at Misenum and at Ravenna. Lake Fucino was large enough that only part of it was needed, surrounded by pontoons, and there was room enough for the vessels to manoeuvre and ram each other. The naumachia of Claudius therefore truly reproduced naval combat.
According to Sextus Julius Frontinus in De aquaeductu (De aquis urbis Romæ, 11, 1-2 : opus naumachiæ), the water supply for the naumachia of Augustus was specially constructed, with the surplus used to water neighbouring gardens in the Trans Tiberim. This was the Aqua Alsietina aqueduct, remains of which have been found on the slopes of Janiculum (the "8th hill of Rome") below the monastery of San Cosimato. There are several theories as to the precise location of the site; the latest of which places it between Via Aurelia in the north and the church of San Francesco a Ripa in the southeast, in the loop of the Tiber. The republican viaduct discovered in the Via Aurelia near San Crisogono may also have served as a conduit for the basin.
The basin did not last very long. During the reign of Augustus it was partly replaced (Suetonius, Augustus, 43, 1) by the nemus Cæsarum (sacred forest of the Caesars), later renamed "forest of Gaius and Lucius" for the grandsons of Augustus (Dion Cassius, 66, 25, 3). This vast area was probably built upon by the end of the 1st century.

Naumachiae in amphitheatres[edit]

Old engraving.
A new development occurred during the reign of Nero: a naumachia in an amphitheatre. Suetonius (Nero, XII, 2-6) and Dio Cassius (Roman History, LXI, 9, 5) speak of such a spectacle in 57 AD in a wooden amphitheatre inaugurated by the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Nothing is known of the site other than that it was built on the Campus Martius. Nero presented another naumachia in 64 AD. This was preceded by hunts and followed by gladiatorial combat and a great banquet (Dion Cassius, LXII, 15, 1). It is unknown what form these games took. It was probably the same wooden amphitheatre, given that there is no mention of its destruction before the great fire of Rome which happened shortly afterwards.
For the inauguration of the Colosseum in 80 AD, Titus gave two naumachiae, one in the Augustinian basin, again using several thousand men, and the other in the new amphitheatre (Dion Cassius, LXVI, 25, 1-4). According to Suetonius (Domitian, IV, 6-7), Domitian organised a naumachia inside the Colosseum, undoubtedly circa 85 AD, and another one in the year 89 AD in a new basin dug beyond the Tiber; with the stone removed serving to repair the Circus Maximus, which had burnt on two sides. It was probably in the time between these two naumachia that Domitian completed the network of rooms underneath the Colosseum that are visible today, at the same time precluding such spectacles in the arena.
The arena at the Colosseum only measured 79.35 x 47.20 meters, far removed from the dimensions of the Augustinian basin. Naumachia in the Colosseum could therefore not have been as grand as the previous ones. One can imagine a confrontation between the crews of several reproductions of warships, potentially life-size or reasonably close to it, but actual maneuvers or even floating seems doubtful. It is known that stage-props were used to represent ships, sometimes with mechanisms to simulate shipwrecks, both on stage and in the arena (Tacitus, Annales, XIV, 6, 1 ; Dion Cassius LXI, 12,2).

Water in the amphitheatres[edit]

The use of enough water to float vessels in amphitheatres raises technical questions. Amphitheatres were not exclusively used for naumachiae; they would have been filled and drained rapidly enough for use in gladiatorial combats and other spectacles. The rapid transition between water shows and earth-based shows seems to have been one of the great attractions. Dion Cassius underscores this as it relates to Nero's naumachia (LXI, 9, 5); Martial does as well speaking of Titus' naumachia in the Colosseum (Book of Spectacles, XXIV). The only surviving written sources offer no descriptions of the mechanisms or engineering involved. Archaeology provides no clues: the basement of the Colosseum has since been modified. Only two provincial amphitheatres, those at Verona and Mérida, Spain, provide any technical evidence.
The central pit of the Verona amphitheatre was deeper than the rooms normally found underneath the arena, and served as a basin. It was connected to two axial conduits. One, circulating under the West gallery of the arena, was not connected to the drainage system and had to be connected to an aqueduct in order to fill the basin. The East conduit was deeper and designed to drain water into the Adige River. The basin at the Mérida amphitheatre, at only 1.5 meters, was shallower than that at Verona. Because it is so shallow—less than the height of a standing man—it cannot be confused with an underground service room. This basin was equipped with access stairs and covered with material similar to that used for swimming pools and Roman baths. It was also served by two conduits, the western one of which connected to the nearby San Lazaro aqueduct.
The dimensions of these basins rule out any but the most basic of naumachiae: the one at Mérida measures a mere 18.5 x 3.7 meters. Only the most modest of water spectacles could have taken place here. This leads one to conclude that, even assuming that the Colosseum had a similar basin before construction of the hypogeum (underground complex), naumachiae would have been performed on only a shallow layer of water covering the surface of the arena.

Decline of Roman naumachia[edit]

The introduction of new technologies initially led to an increased number of naumachia. The first three naumachia were spaced about 50 years apart; the following six, most of which took place in amphitheatres, occurred in a space of 30 years. Less costly in material and human terms, they could afford to be staged more frequently. Less grandiose, they became a feature of the games, but could not be considered exceptional. The iconography bears witness to this. Of some twenty representations of a naumachia in Roman art, nearly all are of the Fourth Style, of the time of Nero and the Flavian dynasty.
After the Flavian period, naumachiae disappear from the texts almost completely. Apart from a mention in the Augustan History, a late source of limited reliability, only the town records (fastia) of Ostia tells us that in 109 Trajan inaugurated a naumachia basin. This site was discovered in the 18th century on the grounds of the Vatican City, behind the Castel Sant'Angelo. Subsequent digs have revealed the complete site plan. It had bleachers (tiered stands for spectators) and the surface was about one sixth the size of the Augustan naumachia. In the absence of any texts, it has to be assumed that it was only used at the time of Trajan.
Nevertheless, if late Roman Empire sources and persistence into the Middle Ages in terms of the toponymy of naumachia and dalmachia at the site are taken into consideration, it still existed into the 5th century. Moreover, the presence of bleachers on its perimeter is a strong indicator of regular shows. According to the Ostia municipal records, the inauguration involved 127 pairs of gladiators; leading one to believe that as in the amphitheatre, the restrictive space at Trajan's basin was not conducive to large combats involving many untrained prisoners, or would have required over-simplification of naval combats, leading to a preference for single combat. In this form, and with a dedicated site, naumachiae could easily have continued (though likely at a reducing frequency) for several centuries without mention in sources, as they would not have been particularly worthy of mention: they simply lost their grandeur and impressive character.
In the provinces, the influence of Roman naumachiae is easily discernible, but limited and reduced to local and innocuous naval games and re-enactments. A competition which went under the name ofnaumaciva was part of the Panathenaic Games between the Athenian Ephebos from the Flavian period onward. It replaced the regattas which had taken place at these games earlier. If Ausonius is to be believed, (Moselle, 200-2,29), a naumachia was held on the Moselle River between local youth.

Post-Roman naumachiae[edit]

A modern naumachia held in the Civic Arena of Milan in 1807
A naumachia was performed for Henry II of France in Rouen in 1550. Another was held in Milan for Napoleon in 1807.
Parc Monceau in Paris features a naumachia water feature, surrounded by a colonnade. In 18th and 19th century England, several parks featured mock naval battles with model ships, which were also referred to as naumachia. Peasholm Park in Scarborough, England, still stages such an event. Smaller, theatre-based aqua dramaswere also popular.
New York artist Duke Riley staged a naumachia in 2009 at the Queens Museum of Art
The history of navigation is the history of seamanship, the art of directing vessels upon the open sea through the establishment of its position and course by means of traditional practice, geometry, astronomy, or special instruments. A few peoples have excelled as seafarers, prominent among them theAustronesians, their descendants the Malays, Micronesians, and Polynesians, the Phoenicians, the ancient Greeks, the Arabs, the Norse, the Venetians, and the Portuguese.

Contents

Antiquity[edit]

Mediterranean[edit]

Sailors navigating in the Mediterranean made use of several techniques to determine their location, including staying in sight of land and understanding of the winds and their tendencies. Minoans of Crete are an example of an early Western civilization that used celestial navigation. Their palaces and mountaintop sanctuaries exhibit architectural features that align with the rising sun on the equinoxes, as well as the rising and setting of particular stars.[1] The Minoans made sea voyages to the island of Thera and to Egypt.[2] Both of these trips would have taken more than a day’s sail for the Minoans and would have left them traveling by night across open water.[2] Here the sailors would use the locations of particular stars, especially those of the constellation Ursa Major, to orient the ship in the correct direction.[2]
Written records of navigation using stars, or celestial navigation, go back to Homer’s Odyssey where Calypso tells Odysseus to keep the Bear (Ursa Major) on his left hand side and at the same time to observe the position of the Pleiades, the late-setting Bootes and the Orion as he sailed eastward from her island Ogygia traversing the Ocean.[3] The Greek poet Aratus wrote in his Phainomena in the third century BC detailed positions of the constellations as written by Eudoxos.[4] The positions described do not match the locations of the stars during Aratus’ or Eudoxos’ time for the Greek mainland, but some argue that they match the sky from Crete during the Bronze Age.[4] This change in the position of the stars is due to the wobble of the Earth on its axis which affects primarily the pole stars.[5] Around 1000 BC the constellation Draco would have been closer to the North Pole than Polaris.[6] The pole stars were used to navigate because they did not disappear below the horizon and could be seen consistently throughout the night.[5]
By the third century BC the Greeks had begun to use the Little Bear, Ursa Minor, to navigate.[7] In the mid-1st century AD Lucan writes of Pompey who questions a sailor about the use of stars in navigation. The sailor replies with his description of the use of circumpolar stars to navigate by.[8] To navigate along a degree of latitude a sailor would have needed to find a circumpolar star above that degree in the sky.[9] For example, Apollonius would have used β Draconis to navigate as he traveled west from the mouth of the Alpheus River to Syracuse.[9]
The voyage of the Greek navigator Pytheas of Massalia is a particularly notable example of a very long, early voyage.[10] A competent astronomer and geographer,[10] Pytheas ventured from Greece through the strait of Gibraltar to Western Europe and the British Isles.[10] Pytheas is the first known person to describe the Midnight Sun,[11] polar ice, Germanic tribes and possibly Stonehenge. Pytheas also introduced the idea of distant "Thule" to the geographic imagination and his account is the earliest to state that the moon is the cause of the tides.
Nearchos’s celebrated voyage from India to Susa after Alexander's expedition in India is preserved in Arrian's account, the Indica. Greek navigator Eudoxus of Cyzicus explored the Arabian Sea for Ptolemy VIII, king of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. According to Poseidonius, later reported in Strabo's Geography, the monsoon wind system of the Indian Ocean was first sailed by Eudoxus of Cyzicus in 118 or 116 BC.[12]
Nautical charts and textual descriptions known as sailing directions have been in use in one form or another since the sixth century BC.[13] Nautical charts using stereographic and orthographic projections date back to the second century BC.[13]
In 1900, the Antikythera mechanism was recovered from Antikythera wreck. This mechanism was built around 1st century BC.

Phoenicia and Carthage[edit]

The Phoenicians and their successors, the Carthaginians, were particularly adept sailors and learned to voyage further and further away from the coast in order to reach destinations faster. One tool that helped them was the sounding weight. This tool was bell shaped, made from stone or lead, with tallow inside attached to a very long rope. When out to sea, sailors could lower the sounding weight in order to determine how deep the waters were, and therefore estimate how far they were from land. Also, the tallow picked up sediments from the bottom which expert sailors could examine to determine exactly where they were. The Carthaginian Hanno the Navigator is known to have sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar c. 500 BC and explored the Atlantic coast of Africa. There is general consensus that the expeditionreached at least as far as Senegal.[14] There is a lack of agreement whether the furthest limit of Hanno's explorations was Mount Cameroon or Guinea's 890-metre (2910-foot) Mount Kakulima.[15]

Asia[edit]

In the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, a navigator could take advantage of the fairly constant monsoon winds to judge direction.[16] This made long one-way voyages possible twice a year.[16]
The earliest known reference to an organization devoted to ships in ancient India is to the Mauryan Empire from the 4th century BC. The Arthashastra of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya's prime minister,Kautilya, devotes a full chapter on the state department of waterways under a navadhyaksha (Sanskrit for "superintendent of ships"). The term, nava dvipantaragamanam (Sanskrit for sailing to other lands by ships) appears in this book in addition to appearing in the Buddhist text Baudhayana Dharmasastra.[citation needed]

Medieval age of navigation[edit]

An 18th century Persian Astrolabe, kept at The Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge, England.
Iceland spar, possibly the Icelandic medieval sunstone used to locate the sun in the sky when obstructed from view.
Further information: Middle Ages, Medieval ships and Islamic geography
The Arab Empire significantly contributed to navigation, and had trade networks extending from the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea in the west to the Indian Ocean and China Sea in the east,[17] Apart from the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, navigable rivers in the Islamic regions were uncommon, so transport by sea was very important. Islamic geography and navigational sciences made use of a magnetic compass and a rudimentary instrument known as a kamal, used for celestial navigation and for measuring the altitudes and latitudes of the stars. The kamal itself was rudimentary and simple to construct. It was simply a rectangular piece of either bone or wood which had a string with 9 consecutive knots attached to it. Another instrument available, developed by the Arabs as well, was the quadrant. Also a celestial navigation device, it was originally developed for astronomy and later transitioned to navigation.[18] When combined with detailed maps of the period, sailors were able to sail across oceans rather than skirt along the coast. According to the political scientist Hobson, the origins of the caravel ship, developed and used for long-distance travel by the Portuguese and later by the Spanish, since the 15th century, date back to the qarib used by Andalusian explorers by the 13th century.[19]
The sea lanes between India and neighboring lands were the usual form of trade for many centuries, and are responsible for the widespread influence of Indian cultureto the societies of Southeast Asia. Powerful navies included those of the Maurya, Satavahana, Chola, Vijayanagara, Kalinga, Maratha and Mughal Empire.
In China between 1040 and 1117, the magnetic compass was being developed and applied to navigation.[20] This let masters continue sailing a course when the weather limited visibility of the sky. The true mariner's compass using a pivoting needle in a dry box was invented in Europe no later than 1300.[16][21]
Nautical charts called portolan charts began to appear in Italy at the end of the 13th century.[22] However, their use did not seem to spread quickly: there are no reports of the use of a nautical chart on an English vessel until 1489.[22]
Vikings used polarization and the Sunstone to allow navigation of their ships by locating the Sun even in a completely overcast sky. This special mineral was talked about in several 13th–14th century written sources in Iceland.

Age of exploration[edit]

Further information: Age of Discovery
The Fra Mauro map, "considered the greatest memorial of medieval cartography" according to Roberto Almagià[23] is a map made between 1457 and 1459 by the Venetian monkFra Mauro. It is a circular planispheredrawn on parchment and set in a wooden frame, about two meters in diameter.
The cross-staff was an ancient precursor to the modern marine sextant.
"The light of navigation", Dutch sailing handbook, 1608, showing compass, hourglass, sea astrolabe, terrestrial and celestial globes, divider, Jacob's staff and astrolabe.
Fairly accurate maps of the Americas were being drawn in the early 17th century.
The commercial activities of Portugal in the early 15th century marked an epoch of distinct progress in practical navigation.[16] These trade expeditions sent out byHenry the Navigator led first to the discovery of Porto Santo Island (near Madeira) in 1418, rediscovery of the Azores in 1427, the discovery of the Cape Verde Islands in 1447 and Sierra Leone in 1462.[16] Henry worked to systemize the practice of navigation.[16] In order to develop more accurate tables on the sun's declination, he established an observatory at Sagres. Combined with the empirical observations gathered in oceanic seafaring, mapping winds and currents, Portuguese explorers took the lead in the long distance oceanic navigation.[24] The Portuguese discovered the two large volta do mar (meaning literally turn of the sea but also return from the sea) currents and trade winds of North and of South Atlantic ocean, that paved the way to reach the New World and return to Europe, as well as to circumnavigate Africa, in future voyages of discovery, avoiding contrary winds and currends.
Henry's successor, John II continued this research, forming a committee on navigation.[16] This group computed tables of the sun's declination and improved themariner's astrolabe, believing it a good replacement for the cross-staff.[16] These resources improved the ability of a navigator at sea to judge his latitude.[16]
In the 15th and 16th centuries, Spain was also in the vanguard of European global exploration and colonial expansion. Spain opened trade routes across the oceans, specially the transatlantic expedition of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Crown of Spain also financed the first expedition of world circumnavigation in 1521. The enterprise was led by Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and completed by Spaniard Juan Sebastián Elcano. The trips of exploration led to trade flourishing across the Atlantic Ocean between Spain and America and across the Pacific Ocean between Asia-Pacific and Mexico via the Philippines. Later, Andrés de Urdanetadiscovered the northern Pacific`s volta do mar return voyage.
The compass, a cross-staff or astrolabe, a method to correct for the altitude of Polaris and rudimentary nautical charts were all the tools available to a navigator at the time of Christopher Columbus.[16] In his notes on Ptolemy's geography, Johannes Werner of Nurenberg wrote in 1514 that the cross-staff was a very ancient instrument, but was only beginning to be used on ships.[22]
Rabbi Abraham Zacuto perfected the astrolabe, which only then became an instrument of precision, and he was the author of the highly accurate Almanach Perpetuum that were used by ship captains to determine the position of their Portuguese caravels in high seas, through calculations on data acquired with an astrolabe. His contributions were undoubtedly valuable in saving the lives of Portuguese seamen, and allowing them to reach Brazil and India. While in Spain he wrote an exceptional treatise on astronomy/astrology in Hebrew, with the title Ha-jibbur Ha-gadol. He published in the printing press of Leiria in 1496, property of Abraão de Ortas the book Biur Luhoth, or in Latin Almanach Perpetuum, which was soon translated into Latin and Spanish. In this book were the astronomical tables (ephemerides) for the years 1497 to 1500, which were instrumental, together with the new astrolabe made of metal and not wood as before, to Vasco da Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral in their voyages around the open Atlantic ocean (including the Southwest Atlantic) and in the Indian Ocean, to India, and to Brazil and India respectively.
Prior to 1577, no method of judging the ship's speed was mentioned that was more advanced than observing the size of the vessel's bow wave or the passage of sea foam or various floating objects.[25] In 1577, a more advanced technique was mentioned: the chip log.[16] In 1578, a patent was registered for a device that would judge the ship's speed by counting the revolutions of a wheel mounted below the ship's waterline.[16]
Accurate time-keeping is necessary for the determination of longitude.[22] As early as 1530, precursors to modern techniques were being explored.[22] However, the most accurate clocks available to these early navigators were water clocks and sand clocks, such as hourglass.[22] Hourglasses were still in use by the Royal Navy of Britain until 1839 for the timing of watches.[22]
Continuous accumulation of navigational data, along with increased exploration and trade, led to increased production of volumes through the Middle Ages.[13]"Routiers" were produced in France about 1500; the English referred to them as "rutters."[13] In 1584 Lucas Waghenaer published the Spieghel der Zeevaerdt (The Mariner’s Mirror), which became the model for such publications for several generations of navigators.[13] They were known as "Waggoners" by most sailors.[13]
In 1537, the Portuguese cosmographer Pedro Nunes published his Tratado da Sphera. In this book he included two original treatises about questions of navigation. For the first time the subject was approached using mathematical tools. This publication gave rise to a new scientific discipline: "theoretical or scientific navigation".
In 1545, Pedro de Medina published the influential Arte de navegar. The book was translated into French, Italian, Dutch and English.[22]
In the late 16th century, Gerardus Mercator made vast improvements to nautical charts.[26]
In 1594, John Davis published an 80-page pamphlet called The Seaman's Secrets which, among other things describes great circle sailing.[26] It's said that the explorerSebastian Cabot had used great circle methods in a crossing of the North Atlantic in 1495.[26] Davis also gave the world a version of the backstaff, the Davis quadrant, which became one of the dominant instruments from the 17th century until the adoption of the sextant in the 19th century.
In 1599, Edward Wright published Certaine Errors in Navigation, which for the first time explained the mathematical basis of the Mercator projection, with calculated mathematical tables which made it possible to use in practice. The book made clear why only with this projection would a constant bearing correspond to a straight line on a chart. It also analysed other sources of error, including the risk of parallax errors with some instruments; and faulty estimates of latitude and longitude on contemporary charts.
In 1631, Pierre Vernier described his newly invented quadrant that was accurate to one minute of arc.[26] In theory, this level of accuracy could give a line of position within a nautical mile of the navigator's actual position.
In 1635, Henry Gellibrand published an account of yearly change in magnetic variation.[27]
In 1637, using a specially built astronomical sextant with a 5-foot radius, Richard Norwood measured the length of a nautical mile with chains.[28] His definition of 2,040 yards is fairly close to the modern International System of Units (SI) definition of 2,025.372 yards. Norwood is also credited with the discovery of magnetic dip 59 years earlier, in 1576.[28]

Modern times[edit]

Edmond Halley's 1701 map charting magnetic variation from true north
In 1714 the British Commissioners for the discovery of longitude at sea came into prominence.[29] This group, which existed until 1828, offered grants and rewards for the solution of navigational problems.[29] Between 1737 and 1828, the commissioners disbursed some £101,000.[29] The government of the United Kingdom also offered significant rewards for navigational accomplishments in this era, such as £20,000 for the discovery of the Northwest Passage and £5,000 for the navigator that could sail within a degree of latitude of the North Pole.[29] A widespread manual in the 18th century was Navigatio Britannica by John Barrow, published in 1750 byMarch & Page and still being advertised in 1787.[30]
Isaac Newton invented a reflecting quadrant around 1699.[31] He wrote a detailed description of the instrument for Edmond Halley, which was published in 1742. Due to this time lapse, credit for the invention has often been given instead to John Hadley and Thomas Godfrey. The octant eventually replaced earlier cross-staffs and Davis quadrants,[29] and had the immediate effect of making latitude calculations much more accurate.
A highly important breakthrough for the accurate determination of longtitude came with the invention of the marine chronometer. The 1714 longitude prize offer for a method of determining longitude at sea, was won by John Harrison, a Yorkshire carpenter. He submitted a project in 1730, and in 1735 completed a clock based on a pair of counter-oscillating weighted beams connected by springs whose motion was not influenced by gravity or the motion of a ship. His first two sea timepieces H1 and H2 (completed in 1741) used this system, but he realised that they had a fundamental sensitivity to centrifugal force, which meant that they could never be accurate enough at sea. Harrison solved the precision problems with his much smaller H4 chronometer design in 1761. H4 looked much like a large five-inch (12 cm) diameter pocket watch. In 1761, Harrison submitted H4 for the £20,000 longitude prize. His design used a fast-beating balance wheel controlled by a temperature-compensated spiral spring. These features remained in use until stable electronic oscillators allowed very accurate portable timepieces to be made at affordable cost. In 1767, the Board of Longitude published a description of his work in The Principles of Mr. Harrison's time-keeper.
In 1757, John Bird invented the first sextant.This replaced the Davis quadrant and the octant as the main instrument for navigation. The sextant was derived from the octant in order to provide for the lunar distance method. With the lunar distance method, mariners could determine their longitude accurately. Once chronometer production was established in the late 18th century, the use of the chronometer for accurate determination of longitude was a viable alternative.[29][32] Chronometers replaced lunars in wide usage by the late 19th century.[25]
In 1891 radios, in the form of wireless telegraphs, began to appear on ships at sea.[33]
In 1899 the R.F. Matthews was the first ship to use wireless communication to request assistance at sea.[33] Using radio for determining direction was investigated by "Sir Oliver Lodge, of England; Andre Blondel, of France; De Forest, Pickard; and Stone, of the United States; and Bellini and Tosi, of Italy."[34] The Stone Radio & Telegraph Company installed an early prototype radio direction finder on the naval collier Lebanon in 1906.[34]
By 1904 time signals were being sent to ships to allow navigators to check their chronometers.[35] The U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office was sending navigational warnings to ships at sea by 1907.[35]
Later developments included the placing of lighthouses and buoys close to shore to act as marine signposts identifying ambiguous features, highlighting hazards and pointing to safe channels for ships approaching some part of a coast after a long sea voyage. In 1912 Nils Gustaf Dalén was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of automatic valves designed to be used in combination with gas accumulators in lighthouses[36]
1921 saw the installation of the first radiobeacon.[35]
The first prototype shipborne radar system was installed on the USS Leary in April 1937.[37]
On November 18, 1940 Mr. Alfred L. Loomis made the initial suggestion for an electronic air navigation system which was later developed into LORAN (long range navigation system) by the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,[38] and on November 1, 1942 the first LORAN System was placed in operation with four stations between the Chesapeake Capes and Nova Scotia.[38]
A 1943 United States military map of world ocean currents and ice packs, as they were known at the time.
In October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik.[39] Scientists at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory took a series of measurements of Sputnik's doppler shift yielding the satellite's position and velocity.[39] This team continued to monitor Sputnikand the next satellites into space, Sputnik II and Explorer I. In March 1958 the idea of working backwards, using known satellite orbits to determine an unknown position on the Earth's surface began to be explored.[39] This led to the TRANSIT satellite navigation system.[39] The first TRANSIT satellite was placed in polar orbit in 1960.[39] The system, consisting of 7 satellites, was made operational in 1962.[39] A navigator using readings from three satellites could expect accuracy of about 80 feet.[39]
On July 14, 1974 the first prototype Navstar GPS satellite was put into orbit, but its clocks failed shortly after launch.[39] The Navigational Technology Satellite 2, redesigned with caesium clocks, started to go into orbit on June 23, 1977.[39] By 1985, the first 11-satellite GPS Block I constellation was in orbit.[39]
Satellites of the similar Russian GLONASS system began to be put into orbit in 1982, and the system is expected to have a complete 24-satellite constellation in place by 2010.[39] The European Space Agency expects to have its Galileo with 30 satellites in place by 2011/12 as well.[39]

Integrated bridge systems[edit]

Electronic integrated bridge concepts are driving future navigation system planning.[40] Integrated systems take inputs from various ship sensors, electronically display positioning information, and provide control signals required to maintain a vessel on a preset course.[40] The navigator becomes a system manager, choosing system presets, interpreting system output, and monitoring vessel response.

Piracy in the ancient Mediterranean has a long documented history, from the Late Bronze Age. The classical historian Janice Gabbert proclaimed “The eastern Mediterranean has been plagued by piracysince the first dawn of history.”[1] Though its prehistory is ambiguously differentiated from trade, this period in history marked the earliest documented wave of piracy.

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Origins[edit]

The roots of the word “piracy” come from the ancient Greek πειράομαι, or peiráomai, meaning “attempt;” i.e. an attempt to rob for personal gain. This morphed into πειρατής, or peiratēs, meaning “brigand,” and from that to the Latin pirata, where we get the modern English word pirate.[2]
A number of geographic and economic characteristics of the classical world produced an environment practically necessitating piracy. First of all, “The coasts of the Mediterranean are particularly favourable to the development of piracy.”[3] The barren, rocky shoreline was not suitable for large scale agriculture and could not support a large population. Therefore, most villages were small and of humble means. Being coastal villages, the primary method of support came from fishing, so most of the able-bodied men had boats, seafaring skills, and navigational knowledge. When fishing wasn’t enough, many men turned to highway robbery and raids of nearby territories to support themselves. However, land trade routes were few and far between, given mountainous obstacles and few rivers. Therefore, most nations deemed “the principal lines of communication should be by sea, and the bulk of commerce should be carried by the same routes.”[4]
In the early days of maritime navigation, most trade vessels hugged the coasts. “Traffic was restricted to fixed lanes in a way impossible on the open ocean.”[5] The naukleroi, or ship-owning merchantmen, moved slowly along established trade routes with their heavy burdens weighing them down. Imagine a fisherman-raider seeing treasure-laden trade ships passing the shores he knows like no one else, day after day. With the motivation and the means to do so, it wasn’t hard for coastal natives to apply themselves to sea-robbery. They brought a thief’s mindset to the sea and simply changing their method of thievery. “The pirate was the robber of the sea highways: and the highways of the Mediterranean were well-defined and well-traveled.”[6]

Early period[edit]

The rocky coast that had been unsuitable for agriculture was perfectly suited to piracy, outfitted with hidden inlets that allowed quick access points to trade routes. “Pirate enclaves grew up along rocky shores that provided shelter and kept them hidden from view until it was too late for their victims to escape.”[7]
These early maritime raiders were at the same time the first true pirates, attacking anyone of any nationality, owing loyalty to no one, but also quite unique. Because of their roots in land raiding, they were known not only to attack ships and coastal towns but also to venture further inland. This caused even the earliest large cities to relocate anywhere from 2 to 10 miles away from shore.[8] Pirates tended not to go any farther inland due to difficulties escaping. Speed was one of the most important elements of piracy. This relocation gave a relatively effective cushion of safety to major cities such as Athens, Tiryns,Mycenae and others. It protected them from the sea’s dangers, although it also cut them off from it benefits. The sea was still the primary, and practically only, area of major commerce. This caused twin cities to be built, one inland city paired with a coastal port, such as Rome and Ostia, Athens and Piraeus, etc. To protect their connection they built “‘long walls’ like those that enclosed the thoroughfare between Athens and Piraeus.”[8] The maritime historian Henry Ormerod said, “If we remember that piracy was, for centuries, a normal feature of Mediterranean life, it will be realized how great has been the influence which it exercised on the life of the ancient world.”[9]
Despite these efforts, they couldn’t completely remove contact between the pirates and the ports. Since they couldn’t effectively disrupt the pirates “business,” it only continued to grow. Men often joined the very pirate ships that attacked their own towns. Even the sailors on merchant ships attacked by pirates turned to piracy themselves when they were out of work. Piracy offered a free and lucrative career, a chance for those who were interested to try to change their lives and better their livelihood a hundredfold in a very short time. For example, the area around Crete, famous for its slave markets, was known as “the Golden Sea” because of how profitable the slave trade was.[6] Unsurprisingly, Crete was also notable for its pirates. In point of fact, if a city had a successful slave market it was most likely a pirate port. Notorious pirate havens like Cilicia and Delos had thriving slave markets. “According to Strabo, as many as ten thousand slaves were sold in Delos in just one day.”[10] Being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery was so common that it was a favorite theme of ancient Greek dramatists.

Sea Peoples[edit]

As piracy expanded, pirates began to organize differently from common brigands, who were bands of mixed nationalities loyal to no one but themselves. There is evidence that the Pirate Articles, which structured the company democratically, “derived from ancient seafaring traditions,” and most likely originated sometime during this period.[11] Over time, this diverse group came to be known collectively as the “Sea Peoples.” They were always referred to in the plural, not as just the “Sea People,” because they were made up of diverse sets of people. They are particularly well known for their clashes with the Egyptians, who called them the “Nine Bows.”[12] It is believed that many were Egyptian subordinates, particularly escaped Hebrews, who are thought to be the group referred to in ancient sources as the Habiru. Other possible members include Tjeker people out of Crete, who left to settle Anatolia, the seat of the Hittite Empire, which is known to have clashed with the Egyptians. “The Tjeker of the Egyptian sources…are mentioned among the Sea Peoples attacking Egypt in the fifth and eighth year of Ramesses III (= 1179 and 1176 BC).”[13] With Crete’s reputation of harboring pirates, it is not too surprising to find much evidence of their involvement with the Sea Peoples.
Two of the earliest groups to be mentioned in connection with the Sea Peoples are the Lukka and the Sherden. They are mentioned in the Amarna letters, a series of 362 clay correspondence tablets from the king of Babylon to Pharaoh Amenhotep or his son Akhenaton, about the fact that these sea raiders were beginning not just to plunder ships but capture towns. One of “the earliest recorded incident[s] – inscribed on a clay tablet while Akhenaton, an Egyptian pharaoh, reigned depicts pirates attacking a ship in 1350 BCE.”[12] Nearly a century later, Ramesses II recorded on the Tanis Stele, “the unruly Sherden whom no one had ever known how to combat, they came boldly sailing in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them.”[14]
A lot of early information about the spread of piracy comes from Egyptian sources first because they were so well documented on non-perishable materials like sandstone temples. Also, Egypt’s dominance as a sea power at this time made them an obvious target. By far the majority of knowledge about the Sea Peoples comes from Ramesses III, who reigned for the large part of the early 12th century BC. Many of his campaigns are recorded on the walls of his mortuary temple, the Medinet Habu, as well as on numerous obelisks and stelae, large stone monuments chronicling battles. It was there he recorded the accounts of attacks by the Tjeker, the Peleset (Philistines), and even the Hittites. To describe the scale of the destruction wrought by Sea Peoples: “No land could stand before their arms, from Hatti, Kode, Carchemish, Arzawa, Alashiya on being cut off.”[15] It is theorized that the simultaneous destruction of the Hittite, Mycenaean and Mitanni kingdoms all around 1175 BC were a result, at least in part, of repeated Sea People attacks. One inscription from 1190 BC describes a great victory over the Nine Bows, from whom he took hostages. However, there is evidence that he instead asked for their military advice, and later hired them as mercenaries.
In fact, they were so widely employed as extra-legal forces that “there seemed to be no real distinction made between a pirate and a mercenary.”[16] Interestingly, despite the closeness between these two unsavory professions, they were not synonymous with “criminal.” Texts like the Medinet Habu and stelae, which are basically billboards of military accomplishments, are quick to denounce the Sea People when they are on opposing side, but when used against one’s enemies, they are a valuable resource. The original Greek word for pirate was not even incorporated into the language until 140 BC.[12] Before then, the various cultural labels (like Egypt’s “Nine Bows”) that all basically referred to the Sea Peoples were applied to such persons by their victims and enemies, not titles they assumed themselves. More often than not, “pirate” simply implied “other;” an outsider, but not necessarily a lawbreaker.[17]
Many ancient texts are actually quite sympathetic to piracy, and even condone it. “In ancient Greece piracy seems to have been widespread and widely regarded as an entirely honourable way of making a living.”[18] Numerous references are made to its perfectly normal occurrence in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, thought to have been written sometime in the 6th or 7th century. Odysseus in fact recounts an incident he himself took part in:
We boldly landed on the hostile place, And sack’d the city, and destroy’d the race, Their wives made captive, their possessions shared, And every soldier found a like reward.[19]
After taking their fill in all they desired, they quickly boarded their ships again and sailed away without any twinge of compunction, just like typical seafaring lowlifes. Over a century later, the Greek historianThucydides (460-395 BC) tells of great men like Odysseus, settling upon this as a profession in his History of the Peloponnesian War:
For in early times the Hellenes and the barbarians of the coast and islands, as communication by sea became more common, were tempted to turn pirate…indeed, this came to be the main source of their livelihood, no disgrace being yet attached to such an achievement, but even some glory.[19]
Plutarch (46–120 AD) writes that piracy had become not just an occupation of poor desperate men, forced into it by necessity, but rather a glorious expedition taken on by those already of high status, seeking further advancement: “
And presently men whose wealth gave them power, and whose lineage was illustrious, and those who laid claim to superior intelligence, began to embark on piratical [peiratike] craft and share their enterprises, feeling that the occupation brought them a certain reputation and distinction.[12]
Apparently, it was also during this time that the idea of a seagoing mercenary morphed into that of a privateer. Almost another two centuries after Thucydides, this practice is referred to in Polybius’ Histories, which covers the period of 220-146 BC. His description of Teuta, Queen of the Illyrians, however, sounds like it could from a 1500s text about Queen Elizabeth: “Her first measure was to grant letters of marque to privateers, authorising them to plunder all whom they fell in with.”[19]
The Sea Peoples were just valuable as assets too be bothered with as detriments. A few rulers did a better job than Ramesses III at trying to rid their kingdoms of the threat of piracy. King Minos of Crete was the first to raise a navy specifically for the purpose of battling piracy. Sources suggest “it is likely he cleared the sea of piracy as far as he was able, to improve his revenues.”[20] He effectively curbed piracy in his area until his fleet was destroyed by a tsunami around 1400 BC, and piratical activities resumed. Alexander the Great also had a run-in with pirates during his campaign to clear his waters of danger. In hisDe Civitate Dei, St. Augustine recounts an exchange between Alexander and a captured pirate:
For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."[19]

Piracy in the Hellenistic period[edit]

Unlike Ramesses’ numerous but ineffectual campaigns and Minos’ brief success, piracy did not resurge again in the Mediterranean until after Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BC. Though it followed quick on the heels of the anarchy created by his failure to name an heir, he set the precedent for a real effort to curb piracy. He also contributed to the foundations for Rome’s future empire, showing that such a thing as “seizing the whole earth” could be achieved.
The phenomenon spread like the plague, but was particularly endemic in certain areas, notably Cilicia (southeastern Turkey) and Illyria (western Balkans) There is evidence that “the coastal Illyrian tribes had created their own type of vessel, the lembus, in which to carry out their depredations.”[21] It was a small, fast ship built to serve the purpose of zipping out from hidden inlets to attack the heavier vessels and then disappearing just as quickly.
“So powerful did the Illyrians become that by 230 BC no honest traders wished to participate in maritime commerce.”[12] But Rome paid little attention to what it initially considered a rag-tag band of amateur brigands harassing a few merchants, partly because the empire’s strength lay in its land-bound forces. However, when Illyrian forces attacked a convoy of ships with grain intended for the military, the Senate decided to send two envoys to Queen Teuta, who promptly had one killed. Outraged, “Consul Gnaeus Fulvius sailed for Illyria with two hundred ships, while Consul Aulus Postumius and 20,000 soldiers marched overland.”[12] By 228 BC, Teuta had surrendered, and the Romans had decimated the forces of one of the most notorious pirate havens in the Mediterranean.

Piracy in the Roman period[edit]

By this point, pirates were looked on with fear, distrust and hatred. When Rome started to fight them seriously, Pirates were declared communes hostes gentium, or enemies of all mankind.[22] With ports becoming less friendly, pirates became more brazen, attacking anyone and everyone to protect themselves. Slave markets dwindled, with their primary suppliers now outlawed. Instead of selling their captives into slavery, pirates discovered that it was not only easier but more profitable to ransom. They came to learn that “the higher the status of the person kidnapped and the more prominent his or her family, the higher the price for their safe return.”[23]
This may have been what Cilician pirates were thinking when in 78 BC they attacked a Roman galley bound for Rhodes, one of Rome’s allies and famous for upholding a zero tolerance policy towards pirates. On board was a young 25-year-old Roman named Julius Caesar, who apparently “sat and read while his fellow passengers cowered before the sea robbers.”[12] When the Pirate Captain named the ransom of 20 talents, varying sources say Caesar was either offended or laughed at them (or both) for underestimating his value and voluntarily offered 50 talents. While they waited for the ransom to arrive on the island of Pharmacusa, Caesar maintained a superior but good-natured air; his captors thought he was joking when he told them how he was going to punish them when he was released. When the sum was delivered, Caesar immediately gathered four ships of 500 legionnaires and returned to where the Cilician fleet was still docked at Pharmacusa, making it easy for Caesar to capture more than 350 of the pirates and reclaim the ransom. He crucified every one of captors, 30 in all. He was made Tribune on his return to Rome.
This was not the end of the Cilicians, however. In 67 BC, Rome’s port of Ostia was set on fire and two prominent Roman senators were kidnapped.[22] Up until this point, Rome secretly tolerated piracy, particularly the Cilicians, because of its demand for slaves. But the ransoming had finally gone too far. “Their seizures of persons in high command, and their ransoming of captured cities, were a disgrace to the Roman supremacy.”[12] Aulus Gabinius, a tribune and lieutenant of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, proposed what amounted to an anti-piracy law to the Senate. The Lex Gabinia (or Gabinian Law) granted the 38-year-old Pompeius, the best soldier in Rome and better known as Pompey the Great, with unprecedented authority, causing a riot in the Senate. When the bill was passed (illegally), Pompey was given unlimited access to the Roman treasury, 500 ships, 120,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry. He alone held total control of the Mediterranean from sea to 50 miles/75 kilometers inland. He subdivided the fleet into 13 squadrons and rooted the last remaining pirate strongholds in the Mediterranean including Cilicia, Crete, Illyria, and Delos. “Historical documents record that Pompeius captured at least 400 vessels while destroying more than 1,000 others.”[12] He accomplished this in three months.
Pompey was not only a skilled soldier; he was also a student of history. Instead of trying to wipe out every last pirate, he tried to change their way of life. Ten thousand pirates died in battle, but surrender was met with not only pardon but reward, and twice that number surrendered.[12] “He [was] determined to translate these pirates from sea to land, and give them a taste of an honest and innocent course of life, by living in towns, and tilling the ground.”[22] So the descendants of the first Mediterranean pirates were back to where their ancestors started.
Out of all the attempts to curb piracy, this was the most successful. The resulting Pax Romana enabled the Mediterranean to experience several centuries of relative safety, but piracy is cyclical in nature; it is never fully extinguished, merely postponed. The fall of the Roman Empire sometime around the 5th century AD marked a renewal of piratical activities in the Mediterranean, which continued to grow through the Middle Ages.

region in Somalia, see Puntland.
The wife of the ruler of Punt from Hatshepsut'sDeir el-Bahri monument.
The Land of Punt, also called Pwenet, or Pwene[1] by the ancient Egyptians, was an Egyptian trading partner known for producing and exporting gold, aromatic resins,blackwood, ebony, ivory, and wild animals. The region is known from ancient Egyptian records of trade missions to it.[2] Some biblical scholars have identified it with the biblical land of Put.[3]
At times Punt is referred to as Ta netjer, the "land of the god".[4]
The exact location of Punt is still debated by historians. Most scholars today believe Punt was located to the southeast of Egypt, most likely in the coastal region of what is todaySomalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Northeast Ethiopia and the Red Sea coast of Sudan.[5] However, some scholars point instead to a range of ancient inscriptions which locate Punt in theArabian Peninsula.[6] It is also possible that the territory covered both the Horn of Africa and Southern Arabia.

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Egyptian expeditions to Punt[edit]

Egyptian soldiers from Hatshepsut's expedition to the Land of Punt as depicted from her temple at Deir el-Bahri.
This relief depicts incense and myrrh trees obtained by Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt
A tree in front of Hatshepsut's temple, claimed to have been brought from Punt by Hatshepsut's Expedition which is depicted on the Temple walls
The earliest recorded Egyptian expedition to Punt was organized by Pharaoh Sahure of the Fifth Dynasty (25th century BC) although gold from Punt is recorded as having been in Egypt in the time of king Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt.[7]
Subsequently, there were more expeditions to Punt in the Sixth, Eleventh, Twelfth and Eighteenth dynasties of Egypt. In the Twelfth dynasty, trade with Punt was celebrated in popular literature in the "Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor".
In the reign of Mentuhotep III (11th dynasty, ca. 2000 BC), an officer named Hannu organized one or more voyages to Punt, but it is uncertain whether he personally traveled on these expeditions.[8] Trading missions of the 12th dynasty pharaohs Senusret I, Amenemhat II and Amenemhat IV had also successfully navigated their way to and from the mysterious land of Punt.[9][10]
In the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, Hatshepsut built a Red Sea fleet to facilitate trade between the head of the Gulf of Aqaba and points south as far as Punt to bring mortuary goods to Karnak in exchange for Nubian gold. Hatshepsut personally made the most famous ancient Egyptian expedition that sailed to Punt. During the reign of Queen Hatshepsut in the 15th century BC, ships regularly crossed the Red Sea in order to obtain bitumen, copper, carved amulets, naptha and other goods transported overland and down the Dead Sea to Elat at the head of the gulf of Aqaba where they were joined with frankincense and myrrh coming north both by sea and overland along trade routes through the mountains running north along the east coast of the Red Sea.[11]
A report of that five-ship voyage survives on reliefs in Hatshepsut's mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri.[12] Throughout the temple texts, Hatshepsut "maintains the fiction that her envoy" Chancellor Nehsi, who is mentioned as the head of the expedition, had travelled to Punt "in order to extract tribute from the natives" who admit their allegiance to the Egyptian pharaoh.[13] In reality, Nehsi's expedition was a simple trading mission to a land, Punt, which was by this time a well-established trading post.[13] Moreover, Nehsi's visit to Punt was not inordinately brave since he was "accompanied by at least five shiploads of [Egyptian] marines" and greeted warmly by the chief of Punt and his immediate family.[12][13] The Puntites "traded not only in their own produce of incense, ebony and short-horned cattle, but [also] in goods from other African states including gold, ivory and animal skins."[13] According to the temple reliefs, the Land of Punt was ruled at that time by King Parahu and Queen Ati.[14] This well illustrated expedition of Hatshepsut occurred in Year 9 of the female pharaoh's reign with the blessing of the god Amun:
Said by Amen, the Lord of the Thrones of the Two Land: 'Come, come in peace my daughter, the graceful, who art in my heart, King Maatkare [ie. Hatshepsut]...I will give thee Punt, the whole of it...I will lead your soldiers by land and by water, on mysterious shores, which join the harbours of incense...They will take incense as much as they like. They will load their ships to the satisfaction of their hearts with trees of green [ie. fresh] incense, and all the good things of the land.'[15]
While the Egyptians "were not particularly well versed in the hazards of sea travel, and the long voyage to Punt, must have seemed something akin to a journey to the moon for present-day explorers...the rewards of [obtaining frankincense, ebony and myrrh] clearly outweighted the risks."[9][16] Hatshepsut's 18th dynasty successors, such as Thutmose III and Amenhotep III also continued the Egyptian tradition of trading with Punt.[17] The trade with Punt continued into the start of the 20th dynasty before terminating prior to the end of Egypt's New Kingdom.[17] Papyrus Harris I, a contemporary Egyptian document which detailed events that occurred in the reign of the early 20th dynasty king Ramesses III, includes an explicit description of an Egyptian expedition's return from Punt:
They arrived safely at the desert-country of Coptos: they moored in peace, carrying the goods they had brought. They [the goods] were loaded, in travelling overland, upon asses and upon men, being reloaded into vessels at the harbour of Coptos. They [the goods and the Puntites] were sent forward downstream, arriving in festivity, bringing tribute into the royal presence.[18]
After the end of the New Kingdom period, Punt became "an unreal and fabulous land of myths and legends."[19]

Ta netjer[edit]

At times, the ancient Egyptians called Punt Ta netjer, meaning "God's Land".[20] This referred to the fact that it was among the regions of the Sun God, that is, the regions located in the direction of the sunrise, to the East of Egypt. These eastern regions' resources included products used in temples, notably incense. Older literature (and current non-mainstream literature) maintained that the label "God's Land", when interpreted as "Holy Land" or "Land of the gods/ancestors", meant that the ancient Egyptians viewed the Land of Punt as their ancestral homeland. W. M. Flinders Petrie believed that the Dynastic Racecame from or through Punt [21] and E. A. Wallis Budge stated that “Egyptian tradition of the Dynastic Period held that the aboriginal home of the Egyptians was Punt...”.[22] The term was not only applied to Punt, located southeast of Egypt, but also to regions of Asia east and northeast of Egypt, such as Lebanon, which was the source of wood for temples.[23]

Location[edit]

Supposed location around the Red Sea and major travel routes by land and sea
The majority opinion places Punt in Eastern Africa, based on the fact that the products of Punt (as depicted in the Hatshepsut illustrations) were abundantly found in the Horn of Africa but were less common or sometimes absent in Arabia. These products included gold and aromatic resins such as myrrh, and ebony; the wild animals depicted in Punt include giraffes, baboons, hippopotami, and leopards. Says Richard Pankhurst : “[Punt] has been identified with territory on both the Arabian and the Horn of Africa coasts. Consideration of the articles which the Egyptians obtained from Punt, notably gold and ivory, suggests, however, that these were primarily of African origin. ... This leads us to suppose that the term Punt probably applied more to African than Arabian territory.”[2][13][24][25]
Some scholars disagree with this view and point to a range of ancient inscriptions which locate Punt in Arabia. Dimitri Meeks has written that “Texts locating Punt beyond doubt to the south are in the minority, but they are the only ones cited in the current consensus about the location of the country. Punt, we are told by the Egyptians, is situated – in relation to the Nile Valley – both to the north, in contact with the countries of the Near East of the Mediterranean area, and also to the east or south-east, while its furthest borders are far away to the south. Only the Arabian Peninsula satisfies all these indications.”[6]
In 2010, a genetic study was conducted on the mummified remains of baboons that were brought back from Punt by the ancient Egyptians. Led by a research team from the Egyptian Museum and the University of California, the scientists used oxygen isotope analysis to examine hairs from two baboon mummies that had been preserved in the British Museum. One of the baboons had distorted isotopic data, so the other's oxygen isotope values were compared to those of modern-day baboon specimens from regions of interest. The researchers found that the mummies most closely matched modern specimens seen in Eritrea and Ethiopia as opposed to those in neighboring Somalia, with the Ethiopian specimens "basically due west from Eritrea". The team did not have the opportunity to compare the mummies with baboons in Yemen. The scientists believed that such an analysis would yield similar results since, according to them, regional isotopic maps suggest that baboons in Yemen would closely resemble those in Somalia. Professor Dominy, one of the lead researchers, concluded from this that "we think Punt is a sort of circumscribed region that includes eastern Ethiopia, Somalia and all of Eritrea."[26]
Pwenet.gif

Egyptian spelling "pwenet"
it should be noted that the feminine "t" ending was not pronounced during the New Kingdom
the last sign is the determinative for country, land		Punthouse01.gif
Wall relief		Punthouse02.jpg
Huts as in relief

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